Commercial photographic printing processes involve the use of multiple pieces of equipment, each performing well-defined functions. For example, a typical commercial photographic printing facility may utilize a film developing station, a film color analyzer, a printer, a print cutter, a print sorter and a print bagger. The object of the concerted operation of this equipment is the economical production of high quality photographic prints from an individual negative.
Commercial photographic printers are devices capable of exposing photographic positive paper in response to illumination from photographic negatives. These processes are well known in the art. Because of the economies of scale, it is desirable to print photographs in a commercial environment as quickly and accurately as possible. In the past, commercial photographic printing equipment utilized manual techniques for transporting large reels of film through the printer. Typically, a printer operator would hand crank a "take-up" reel to pull a roll of negatives from a feed reel, across the exposure window or "gate" and the frame of the printer. This system was prone to operator error and damage to the film. Accordingly, efforts were undertaken to develop an automated approach to the process, and in recent years, mechanically operated film drive mechanisms have been used to transport the film through such printers.
Typically, some of this equipment is capable of operating in a manual, automatic, or semi-automatic mode. The commercial printer may require a human operator to manually look through a series of negatives, locate an appropriate negative, and place the negative in proper position and orientation in the printer for producing a suitable exposure of the negative on the photographic paper Thereafter, the operator will cause the machine to cycle and thereby expose the paper. In determining how the prints are to be made, the operator may be guided by certain predetermined parameters, for example, color balance, position of the subject in relation to the edges of the negative, and the desired "order" information from the customer, i.e., how many prints of a particular size are desired from a given negative. Such manual operations may also be applicable to machines such as color analyzers or print cutters. Manual operations of this nature are very prone to error, due to the large number of photographic prints which a processing facility must produce in a given time period, and due to the fact that the operator is often viewing a negative image. Further, manual operations which attempt to correlate particular photographs with particular customer or photographer instructions are plagued with error, inasmuch as photographic negatives do not normally contain any information correlative of the subject with such instructions. Attempts to minimize errors in processing using manual methods have, accordingly, been directed toward modern automation techniques.
Initially, photographic equipment has been developed which relies upon physical marks placed on the photographic negative itself. Early attempts to automate the printing process utilized the addition of a notch cut in the edge of each negative in a continuous roll of film. Photographic equipment through which such rolls of negative film were transported could, utilizing a sensor, determine the existence and position of such a notch, and thereby offer some machine control over the process of handling said negatives. For example, a printer operator could rapidly advance to the next frame in a roll of film simply by operating a switch which would advance the film to the next frame.
It became apparent that this system could be improved upon by substituting punched holes along the edge of the negative, in place of a single notch. Certain printers, for example, could identify up to 10 punched hole positions on any negative. These holes could be placed in a predetermined pattern and thereby provide a discreet frame number for each negative, a discrete package code, and density information. Further, special circumstances (such as a "blink" frame, where the subject had blinked at the time the shutter of the camera was operated) could be identified with a special "blink code", thereby alerting the operator to skip printing of that frame. Thereafter, efforts were undertaken to automate the operation of the commercial photographic equipment further, by allowing the equipment to operate automatically based on the pre-punched codes. An entire roll of negative film could be pre-punched, and an automated photographic printer, for example, could process the entire roll with minimal human intervention.
This method, too, had shortcomings. No method existed for selectively altering the punched codes once they had been placed on the film. Further, because of the inherent space limitations of the physical size of such film, it was impossible to encode certain information necessary to the successful production of consistent quality prints. Accordingly, efforts were made to prepare machine readable data and instructions which could operate associatively with the notches or punched codes. Early efforts led to the production of commercial photographic printers which utilized magnetic tape to send pre-programmed package instructions to a printer in sequence in response to the signals generated by notched film. These efforts met with only limited success however, inasmuch as a single machine reading error produced consecutive errors in film package printing sequences.
To overcome these difficulties, micro-computer technology was first applied to create dedicated controllers which contained permanent, resident memory routines which operated a single piece of photographic equipment in response to codes punched on the negative film. More recently, devices and methods have been developed which allow correlation of electronically stored data relating to a particular film negative. Such technology is disclosed in U.S. Pat. application No. 07/172,805, currently pending, and subject to certain allowed claims therein.
It is desirable, however, to increase the flexibility of present art to allow total computer control over the entire photographic printing process. Data regarding any photographic negative must be storable and retrievable associatively with each discrete photographic negative. In addition, the data must be modifiable by the commercial photographic studio. Moreover, the data must be accessible to each type of photographic processing equipment within the photographic processing facility, either by use of transportable media, or over a computer network. The present invention is a method to achieve these desired goals.